When 'Home For The Holidays' Doesn't Feel Like It

My mom is ripping up the carpets again. The floor in the den is flimsy plywood for now, buckling at the edges where it fits together. She replaced the windows, too, with smaller ones. "Because they made the room feel chilly," she said. She's right, but all I could think about was the shadow of the little girl I was, stacking toys along the sill and pasting laminated decorations on the panes, leaving a lattice of fingerprints on cold glass. How I used to pretend that the rug was the sea.

I've always been sentimental about places, and none more so than the blue-and-white house on the bend of a quiet street where I grew up. Lately, whenever I'm there, I can't stop cataloguing the changes: I peer at the ghostly shade of the musclewood tree that we had to chop down. Can the birch that was planted when I was a baby really be gone? I look for the bleeding hearts that grew in the side yard, pink flowers dripping petals like silver charms, and those low-hanging pine branches I once climbed to a perch among the telephone wires. Gold stars I stenciled in my bedroom in fourth grade have been painted over. The fruit stickers I hid under a corner of the kitchen counter were discovered and peeled off. A storm destroyed the swing set where I spent so many afternoons, though by then the wood was rotted green and the swings' chains crinkled with rust.

In the six years since I moved away from my parents' house, I've led a pretty rootless existence. I am very lucky; I've always had a place to sleep, even if it was just a couch or slowly leaking air mattress. But in six years I have lived at nine addresses in three cities and two continents. Compared to the decade and a half that I woke up every morning in the same twin-sized bed, this transience is like whiplash. Some people are restless; they crave displacement, scenery that gushes by and never freezes solid. I am not one of those people.

Though I've loved each doorstep I've called my own so far, some days I only want to stay. I have a wobbly set of IKEA furniture, bare whitewashed walls, a revolving cast of roommates. Will I ever stop moving long enough to hang my $15 mirror on a nail? To unpack the photographs in my dresser and wipe off the dust they've collected? What's the point, if I'll be vanished in six months?

[pullquote align="C"]There is magic in learning the secrets of a new city, that warm jolt when you find a cramped cafe or winding park path and know you'll return. Sometimes we need tangible beginnings.[/pullquote]

This is why I've zeroed in on the physical shifts at my parents' house. In the short years of my young adulthood, I have sometimes felt like all the parts of my life were scattered around me, spinning and adrift. A carousel of faces, maps, thresholds, tickets, suitcases. Nothing solid to cling to. Nothing I could certainly control. With all this twenty-something grappling and doubt comes a longing for anything that endures. One of my long-time friends said to me once that she loved coming to my parents' house because it was exactly the way it was when we were 12, when we still read Harry Potter books at bowling lane birthday parties. My living room is like a portal for time travel.

But my house is not a museum. It never was. Five children and their father lived there before my family; an older couple before them. Sixty years ago, my house was a leafy patch of orchard in a horse farmer's estate. Some day, another little girl will play on the lawn, squashing crabapples under her toes. She'll trace Orion's Belt through that skylight above the kitchen stairs and wonder why there's a sign in Irish Gaelic glued to the bathroom tiles on the second floor.

I understand that everything changes and that it must, but it's hard sometimes, especially in this between-time, a stretch when no key ring and no mail box seems to last, when there is so little permanence I can be desperate for it. I am getting better at forward motion. I am almost used to it, and I worry I am starting to believe in its power as a cure for unhappy memories, an escapist crutch. If you've had a bad break-up in that neighborhood, why not start over 80 blocks south? That's not what I want—I don't want to flee, if I can help it. And I don't want to get stuck staring at the road shimmering behind me, reliving all the pasts I can't have back. Keeping still can be its own prison. There is magic in learning the secrets of a new city, that warm jolt when you find a cramped cafe or winding park path and know you'll return. Sometimes we need tangible beginnings.

What I wish for is a space that is mine. A desk drawer so stuffed I've forgotten what's at the bottom. Shelves for the books that don't fit. Runners bleached by sunlight. Pictures in frames. Not enough emptiness for echoes. I don't know how soon I'll have it, if I'll ever have it, and I think for now, that's okay. I am blessed to have seen so many places, crossed oceans alone and wandered through towns crowded with strangers. What I've come to accept is that this is what it's like to be 25 and slightly lost. There's nothing left to do but let the fickle ground tilt beneath my feet, and try to stand instead of topple.

Kiley Bense is a writer and journalist whose creative nonfiction focuses on the intersections of history, memory, and family. Her essays have previously appeared online for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Narratively, and Saveur, among others. Read more of her work at kileybense.com.

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